What are you reading?

[Cheech Tremendous 0]

I have about 30 pages left in Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor. The style of this book is nearly identical to Choke. Do all of his books sound exactly the same? I can imagine Choke, Fight Club and Survivor existing in the exact same world. Even the main characters seem similar.

 

I really enjoy his writing style and the stories themselves are just mindless entertainment, but I can't see myself looking into any of his other books if they are just a rehash of "strange guy gets put in awkward situation before something outlandish and unexpected happens."

[Mik 0]

Book 6 of Stephen King's "The Dark Tower Series", Song of Susannah.

 

I'm not sure how familiar most people are or are not with the series. It's considered a classic but I'm unsure how widespread this notion is.

 

Anyway - I love it. The mythology is great, the combination of Western and fantasy is great and King's writing is superb as usual. This will be the series and the work he is remembered for, I think. I have a book and a half to go - can't wait to see how it turns out.

 

On deck, The Republican War on Science and a personal finance book.

[Youth N Asia 0]

Book 6 of Stephen King's "The Dark Tower Series", Song of Susannah.

 

 

That book nearly killed the series for me, almost kept me from reading book 7

 

when he puts himself in the storyline I lost almost all interest in it

 

Book 7 is much better

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

Emma by Jane Austen

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said

 

I also have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire checked out from the library, but I haven't had a chance to start reading it yet. I've flipped though it, though, and it looks quite promising.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

The Influence of Sea Power Upon History

[Guest cobainwasmurdered]

"A History Of Militarism Civilian and Military" by Alfred Vagts. I've just started it but the idea behind it seems to be that overly militaristic countries become less skilled at warfare then countries that are less rigid.

[George_South 0]

Reading a few at the moment:

 

"A Fan's Notes," Frederick Exley

"Jesus' Son," Denis Johnson

"Airships," Barry Hannah

[godthedog 0]

Emma by Jane Austen

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said

 

I also have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire checked out from the library, but I haven't had a chance to start reading it yet. I've flipped though it, though, and it looks quite promising.

 

tell me you're not reading 'anti-oedipus' by choice.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

Kinda. I'm not really "reading" it, per se. A better description would be "trawling it for shit to use in my undergraduate thesis." The expedition has been less than fruitful thus far.

 

edit: Also, I'd previously read D&G's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and found it somewhat interesting, so I decided to check out their supposed magnum opus to see what else they had to offer.

[godthedog 0]

they got my interest when they said something like, "we are all/everything is a producing-machine." then they lost me when they said something like, "this is not just a metaphor."

 

deleuze on his own is difficult enough but at least earnest. d & g together are insufferable. not just opaque, but dickish about how opaque they are.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

In the home stretch of David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System. Ugh, this has not aged well since I first read it a decade ago. Too clever for its own good; no one seemed to love Wallace's writing more than Wallace himself at the time he wrote this novel. It's funny in spots, sometimes screamingly so—the passage where Norman Bombardini ordered nine steaks for dinner had me in stitches—but Wallace crammed these "zany" jokes in practically every one of this novel's 467 pages, and, unsurprisingly, many of them fall flat. Also, not one of the characters in the book behave or act in any real human way, so most of them end up cold and unsympathetic if not outright hateful. Little evidence of the man who would later move me to tears and still be hilarious and insightful in his short stories and Infinite Jest.

 

Oh well. This weekend I'll crack into my Library of America collection of John Cheever novels. First up, The Wapshot Chronicle.

[Special K 0]

Ha ha, I'm reading Emma too!

 

Also Spook Country by William Gibson. And Queen of Sorcery by David Eddings because I'm apparently eleven years old again.

 

Just finished Neal Gaiman's Neverwhere, looking forward to picking up American Gods.

[godthedog 0]

In the home stretch of David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System. Ugh, this has not aged well since I first read it a decade ago. Too clever for its own good; no one seemed to love Wallace's writing more than Wallace himself at the time he wrote this novel. It's funny in spots, sometimes screamingly so—the passage where Norman Bombardini ordered nine steaks for dinner had me in stitches—but Wallace crammed these "zany" jokes in practically every one of this novel's 467 pages, and, unsurprisingly, many of them fall flat. Also, not one of the characters in the book behave or act in any real human way, so most of them end up cold and unsympathetic if not outright hateful. Little evidence of the man who would later move me to tears and still be hilarious and insightful in his short stories and Infinite Jest.

 

Oh well. This weekend I'll crack into my Library of America collection of John Cheever novels. First up, The Wapshot Chronicle.

 

i gave up on this one yesterday, with 80 or so pages to go. i also didn't LOL once. mad kudos to DFW for being able to churn out 400+ pages of very readable content in his early 20s, but he needed a max perkins-type editor who could ask him hard questions about his own work and rein in his talents. also feels forced in a strange way. not at all like his nonfiction stuff i love so much, which is like breathing.

 

i've taken up virginia woolf's 'to the lighthouse' instead, which i'm already enjoying considerably more. but i am sort of wishing that she wouldn't go to the "display of character's rich interior life explored deeply while character stares into space" so often.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

While I think it's strange to make it that far into a longish book and then decide to give up, I don't blame you. It's getting more and more difficult to go all the way the closer I get to the end. It's not that it's getting worse, it's just more of the same. But yeah, it's very readable in the sense that it goes down quickly. And though I did laugh a handful of times, they were all mostly early on, before he started repeating the same gags over and over again.

 

Have you read any of his other fiction? Girl with Curious Hair. which came out two years later, is worlds better.

[Guest Czech please!]

Yeah, I only like the beginning of that book too. Its quality does dwindle. I haven't read GWCH in like two years.

[snuffbox 0]

Annual reading of Sometimes a Great Notion.

[Guest Vitamin X]

I'm getting back to finishing up Catch-22 now that school's winding down and I can read for fun now. After that, I'm either getting started on reading either Junky by William Burroughs or Dharma Bums by Kerouac. I'm feeling very beat.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

they got my interest when they said something like, "we are all/everything is a producing-machine." then they lost me when they said something like, "this is not just a metaphor."

 

deleuze on his own is difficult enough but at least earnest. d & g together are insufferable. not just opaque, but dickish about how opaque they are.

 

Did you get through the whole thing? I've found that it grows more lucid and digestible as they move away from abstract psychoanalytic theory and toward a more concrete analysis of capitalist society. I mean, it's still super dense and rather opaque, but it's not cryptic to the point of obfuscation like the earlier sections.

[Obi Chris Kenobi 0]

I have about 30 pages left in Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor. The style of this book is nearly identical to Choke. Do all of his books sound exactly the same? I can imagine Choke, Fight Club and Survivor existing in the exact same world. Even the main characters seem similar.

 

You know, I've always meant to get around to reading Fight Club the book since I like the movie so much. Would you recommend it?

 

I'm currently waiting for World War Z to arrive then I'll be reading that.

[RavishingRickRudo 0]

"Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Siefe is my bus book. Up to now it's been a pretty good read, it is mostly a history book going chronologically, so the math explanations have been fairly simple. But now that we're getting into the 19th and 20th century, I'm pretty much just nodding my head without much comprehension. All I know is that the big equations are relevant.

[Swindle 0]

I'm not a big book reader, but today it was raining, I didn't feel like tv or video games, so I picked up a book from my dad's collection and tore through it. An Innocent Man by John Grisham. The story is so insane, I thought it was just a crazy fictional crime drama, til about half-way through, when I saw the photos of the big time players. It was non-fiction! Damn. Two men convicted for rape and murder, one sent to death row, all based on junk science and jailhouse snitches. And one of the star witnesses was the guy who actually committed the murder. I couldn't put the book down and finished it in about 10 hrs.

 

Then I did a google search and found the district attorney Bill Peterson has a website nitpicking the book. What an idiot.

[George_South 0]

While I think it's strange to make it that far into a longish book and then decide to give up, I don't blame you. It's getting more and more difficult to go all the way the closer I get to the end. It's not that it's getting worse, it's just more of the same. But yeah, it's very readable in the sense that it goes down quickly. And though I did laugh a handful of times, they were all mostly early on, before he started repeating the same gags over and over again.

 

Have you read any of his other fiction? Girl with Curious Hair. which came out two years later, is worlds better.

 

Agreed---GWCH is easily my favorite work of his.

[Obi Chris Kenobi 0]

I have about 30 pages left in Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor. The style of this book is nearly identical to Choke. Do all of his books sound exactly the same? I can imagine Choke, Fight Club and Survivor existing in the exact same world. Even the main characters seem similar.

 

You know, I've always meant to get around to reading Fight Club the book since I like the movie so much. Would you recommend it?

 

I'm currently waiting for World War Z to arrive then I'll be reading that.

 

World War Z by Max Brooks (Mel Brooks' son) is going to be made into a movie. Could be good!

[Mik 0]

Book 6 of Stephen King's "The Dark Tower Series", Song of Susannah.

 

 

That book nearly killed the series for me, almost kept me from reading book 7

 

when he puts himself in the storyline I lost almost all interest in it

 

Book 7 is much better

 

I was not a big fan of that myself.

 

On to the 7th book and final book. It's taken me nearly 5 months to read the whole series to this point due to business and what have you. I just ended a 6 month relationship and I might end up spending a longer percentage of time with Roland Deschain in my life than my ex-girlfriend.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

I thought all of the Dark Tower books after the 3rd went downhill pretty fast.

[Youth N Asia 0]

Book 4 was good for backstory, I appreciated it more the second time I read it.

 

Book 5 was solid. Didn't care much for the preacher's backstory, but I liked the town's story as a whole

 

Book 6 as stated was borderline unreadable. The Susanah (or however it's spelled) stuff was insanely boring, on top of the King stuff

 

Book 7...solid mostly, but missed a couple times. I liked the story about the town with the breakers.

 

Personally I rank the books as 3, 1, 5, 4, 7, 2, 6 (book 2 dragged)

 

And if he were a little younger I always pictured Dean Winters as Eddie

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Reading Cheever's The Wapshot Scandal, which, so far, is looser and funnier than the first Wapshot book. Which I liked, by the way. Granted, I still have roughly 200 pages to go so all this could change, but I'm preferring the second book's comparatively lighter tone to the first one's occasionally relentless gloom.

[Swindle 0]

Picked up a book a Walmart recently on a whim.... Small Favor. It's actually deep in a series of books following the adventures of a wizard. The fact that I have never read another of them didn't take away from my enjoyment. Easy to figure out the players and the conflict. Its a fun book.